From Here to There, 2023
wood, felt, clay
6’ H x 14” D x 2′ W
Photo by Etienne Frossard
Curated by Krista Caballero
List of Participating Artists:
Aarati Akkapeddi
Birding the Future (Krista Caballero and Frank Ekeberg)
Jeremy Dennis
Ellen Driscoll
Jean-Marc Superville Sovak
Jenny Irene Miller
Luz María Sánchez
Bently Spang
Sayo’:klʌ Kindness Williams
Keith Wilson
Elizabeth Withstandley
Saya Woolfalk
zhaoyuefan
We acknowledge the traditional homelands of the Mohican, Haudenosaunee, and Schaghticoke, upon which the Opalka Gallery resides
Acts of naming are not merely descriptive or representative—they have creative capacity and actively take part in shaping our worlds. As a multi-sited, multidisciplinary exhibition, To Be—Named reflects upon how names are created and used to shape, reshape, and sometimes mis-shape, our worlds, and identities. Artists included in the exhibitions investigate, contend with, and complicate naming practices to reveal ways that personal experiences often collide with collective ones, creating our political, cultural, and ecological realities.
From Here to There
A small woolen hooded jacket with the edges of maps cut into the hems, hangs on a branch. Maps of all the continents of the world fall from a sleeve and hang on the opposite end of the branch.
A fragment of a woolen blanket cut into the map of an urban plan hangs from the branch behind these maps.
A bird, perspectively small, as if seen from a great distance, overlooks the maps below.
The sculpture presents the viewer with a freeze frame of an absent figure temporarily in stasis during a larger transit. The one to one scale of the child size jacket is juxtaposed with the great distances of the entire world, seen in miniature in the continental maps cut out of felt. The plan of the unnamed city, also cut out of the woolen felt, suggests both a blanket, and a potential destination within the larger scale of the cascading world maps. The sculpture holds these micro and macro scale juxtapositions in suspension—in between departure and arrival.
